Laughter Is Still Music to Victor Borge's Ear

By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Special to The New York Times

Published: December 5, 1989

GREENWICH, Conn.—
Victor Borge was at the Bosendorfer concert grand in the studio of his estate on Greenwich Harbor. He was being photographed and did not seem very happy about it. He observed his 80th birthday this year, and the celebrations, on a worldwide basis, involve being photographed.

''Turn this way; turn that way; let's try this; let's try that,'' the photographer kept saying. Mr. Borge, a sour look on his face, complied. A visitor entered, watched for a while and, to reinforce the prevailing mood, went to another piano in the studio, a Steinway B, and played the opening measures of Chopin's ''Funeral March.''

Mr. Borge grinned. He started improvising around the Chopin theme. He swung into Scriabin's D-sharp-minor Etude and by some miracle of ingenuity managed to weave the ''Funeral March'' into it. He jazzed up the ''Funeral March,'' then played it in the style of Mozart. He was happy. So was the photographer.

At the piano Mr. Borge is facile and elegant, and he produces a sound that reflects a school of piano playing that is all but extinct. It is a warm, rich, highly nuanced sound. He gets it through pedal mixtures and by the formation of his own hands - large, spatulate hands with cushions on each fingertip. 'An Ideal of Sound in My Ears'

''The left pedal,'' he explained, ''is as important as the right. You have to do a great deal of experimentation with it, mixing it in with the right pedal, before you can get the colors you want. You just don't plunk your foot down on the pedals and leave it there. I have an ideal of sound in my ears.''

His visitor wondered whether Mr. Borge might have developed into a great pianist if he had put his mind to it.

''Who knows?'' he said. ''I had some limitations. For instance, I was never a fast reader.'' He grinned. ''Neither was Josef Hofmann, for that matter.'' Hofmann, who died in 1957, was one of the great pianists. ''But if I could not read music easily, I could memorize it after a few slow run-throughs, and once I memorized it, I never forgot it. I also could do something that not many of my fellow musicians can, and that is improvise. Could I have been a great pianist? Certain things are so important. If one of those things is missing, a pianist, or any performing artist, can never rise to the heights. I never had everything, like a Horowitz.''

So he has risen to different heights, loved the world over as the premier musical comic of his time. He still keeps at it, maintaining a hectic schedule. Today, he opens a weeklong engagement at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. A television special is scheduled on PBS, from 9:30 to 11 P.M. on New Year's Day on many public stations and a week later on Channel 13. Next season he is booked for 80 appearances, and it will probably be 100 before the final returns are in and he can come back home to Greenwich, where he lives with his wife and is visited by any or all of his four children and numerous grandchildren. Approach Has Never Changed

For his appearances he has worked out a format that has delighted amateurs and professionals alike. He has never changed his approach, but he manages to improvise all of his performances. When he walks onstage, he never knows exactly what he will do. Somebody in the audience may set him off, and he will take it from there. Or he may warm up by making jokes about the hall, which is too hot or too cold. Of course, he has his set pieces. Of course, he always announces that he will play a piece and somehow never gets around to doing it. Of course, there will be stories about his father, or his grandfather, who invented a drink called 3-Up, then improved it to 4-Up and 5-Up, marketed it as 6-Up and died of a broken heart when it was not a success.

He was a child prodigy, at the piano from the age of 3. He was born in Copenhagen on Jan. 3, 1909; his real name is Borg Rosenbaum. His father, a Russian who had immigrated to Copenhagen, was 60 years old when Borg was born, and had for many years been a violinist with the Royal Danish Symphony Orchestra.

There was no ghetto in Copenhagen, and the Jewish colony was a small one. ''I never knew anything about Jewishness until a schoolboy called me 'Jewboy,' '' he said. ''When I went home I asked my mother what 'Jewboy' meant. That got me angry. It fired me up. Little by little I felt that I had to be better than any of my schoolmates. And I could do that because I was a natural musician and a good student. '' Wanted to Conduct Opera

The boy grew up in music. His father's orchestra was also the opera orchestra, and Borg spent a great deal of time in the opera house, deciding that he wanted to be an opera conductor when he grew up. But first he had to learn the piano. His mother was his first teacher, then a colleague of his father's. Then he got a scholarship to the conservatory in Copenhagen, where he eventually worked under Victor Schioler. Schioler was the leading Danish pianist and enjoyed a considerable European reputation. He took three of his pupils to Vienna. Borg was one.